Akenside

From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781.

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Mark Akenside was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at Newcastle-
upon-Tyne. His father Mark was a butcher, of the Presbyterian sect;
his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. He received the first part of
his education at the grammar-school of Newcastle; and was afterwards
instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy. At the age of
eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh that he might qualify himself for
the office of a dissenting minister, and received some assistance
from the fund which the dissenters employ in educating young men of
scanty fortune. But a wider view of the world opened other scenes,
and prompted other hopes: he determined to study physic, and repaid
that contribution, which being received for a different purpose, he
justly thought it dishonourable to retain. Whether, when he
resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to be a
dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and
outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which
sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind
which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or
degrading greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is
innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and
confound, with very little care what shall be established.

Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions
of genius, and one of those students who have very early stored
their memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances
were produced in his youth; and his greatest work, "The Pleasures of
Imagination," appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it
was published, relate that when the copy was offered him, the price
demanded for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such
as he was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to
Pope, who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a
niggardly offer; for "this was no every-day writer."

In 1741 he went to Leyden in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards (May 16, 1744) became Doctor of Physic, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch Universities, published a
thesis or dissertation. The subject which he chose was "The
Original and Growth of the Human Foetus;" in which he is said to
have departed, with great judgment, from the opinion then
established, and to have delivered that which has been since
confirmed and received.

Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of
contradiction, and no friend to anything established. He adopted
Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the
discovery of truth. For this he was attacked by Warburton, and
defended by Dyson; Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the
end of his dedication to the Freethinkers. The result of all the
arguments which have been produced in a long and eager discussion of
this idle question may easily be collected. If ridicule be applied
to any position as the test of truth it will then become a question
whether such ridicule be just; and this can only be decided by the
application of truth, as the test of ridicule. Two men fearing, one
a real, and the other a fancied danger, will be for a while equally
exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice, contemptuous
censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state of both
cases must be known before it can be decided whose terror is
rational and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be
despised. Both are for a while equally exposed to laughter, but
both are not therefore equally contemptible. In the revisal of his
poem, though he died before he had finished it, he omitted the lines
which had given occasion to Warburton's objections. He published,
soon after his return from Leyden (1745), his first collection of
odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotism to write a very
acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatises, under the name
of Curio, as the betrayer of his country. Being now to live by his
profession, he first commenced physician at Northampton, where Dr.
Stonehouse then practised, with such reputation and success, that a
stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him. Akenside tried the
contest a while; and, having deafened the place with clamours for
liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than two years,
and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man of
accomplishments like his. At London he was known as a poet, but was
still to make his way as a physician; and would perhaps have been
reduced to great exigencies but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of
friendship that has not many examples, allowed him three hundred
pounds a year. Thus supported, he advanced gradually in medical
reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice or
eminence of popularity. A physician in a great city seems to be the
mere plaything of fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most
part, totally casual--they that employ him know not his excellence;
they that reject him know not his deficience. By any acute observer
who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for half a
century a very curious book might be written on the "Fortune of
Physicians."

Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he
placed himself in view by all the common methods; he became a Fellow
of the Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was
admitted into the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but
published from time to time medical essays and observations; he
became physician to St. Thomas's Hospital; he read the Gulstonian
Lectures in Anatomy; but began to give, for the Croonian Lecture, a
history of the revival of learning, from which he soon desisted; and
in conversation he very eagerly forced himself into notice by an
ambitious ostentation of elegance and literature. His "Discourse on
the Dysentery" (1764) was considered as a very conspicuous specimen
of Latinity, which entitled him to the same height of place among
the scholars as he possessed before among the wits; and he might
perhaps have risen to a greater elevation of character but that his
studies were ended with his life by a putrid fever June 23, 1770, in
the forty-ninth year of his age.

Akenside is to be considered as a didactic and lyric poet. His
great work is the "Pleasures of Imagination," a performance which,
published as it was at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations
that were not amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to
very particular notice as an example of great felicity of genius,
and uncommon aptitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with
images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them. With
the philosophical or religious tenets of the author I have nothing
to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen,
as it includes all images that can strike or please, and thus
comprises every species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is
in the choice of examples and illustrations; and it is not easy in
such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury
and satiety. The parts seem artificially disposed, with sufficient
coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury
to the general design. His images are displayed with such
luxuriance of expression that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon,
by a "Veil of Light;" they are forms fantastically lost under
superfluity of dress. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. The words
are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts
the mind, and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the
gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and sometimes delighted; but, after
many turnings in the flowery labyrinth, comes out as he went in. He
remarked little, and laid hold on nothing. To his versification
justice requires that praise should not be denied. In the general
fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior to any other writer
of blank verse; his flow is smooth, and his pauses are musical; but
the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long continued, and
the full close does not occur with sufficient frequency. The sense
is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated clauses,
and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of
closing the sense with the couplet betrays luxuriant and active
minds into such self-indulgence that they pile image upon image,
ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the
sense at all. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often
found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in
narration tiresome. His diction is certainly poetical, as it is not
prosaic; and elegant, as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as
having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the
blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases, or twists his
metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is
strained when "he views the Ganges from Alpine heights"--that is,
from mountains like the Alps. And the pedant surely intrudes (but
when was blank verse without pedantry?) when he tells how "Planets
absolve the stated round of Time."

It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to
revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his
design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he
had made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He
seems to have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not
whether he has gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour.
In the additional book the "Tale of Solon" is too long. One great
defect of this poem is very properly censured by Mr. Walker, unless
it may be said in his defence that what he has omitted was not
properly in his plan. "His picture of man is grand and beautiful,
but unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural
consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is
scarcely once hinted throughout the poem. This deficiency is amply
supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young, who, like a good
philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man from the
grandeur of his conceptions and the meanness and misery of his
state; for this reason a few passages are selected from the 'Night
Thoughts,' which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete
view of the powers, situation, and end of man."--"Exercises for
Improvement in Elocution," p. 66.

His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration
will despatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself
so diligently to lyric poetry, having neither the ease and airiness
of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode.
When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp his former powers seem
to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression or
variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant.
Yet such was his love of lyrics that, having written with great
vigour and poignancy his "Epistle to Curio," he transformed it
afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to its author.

Of his odes nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly
want force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and
uncouth, the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes
dissonant or unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or
arranged with too little regard to established use, and therefore
perplexing to the ear, which in a short composition has not time to
grow familiar with an innovation. To examine such compositions
singly cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker
parts; but, when they are once found to be generally dull, all
further labour may be spared, for to what use can the work be
criticised that will not be read?